I heard this quote by Alex Hormozi from Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast:

“…if you cannot function without your routine, your routine owns you, you do not own it. Full stop.”

At first this hit me hard. I’m so committed to my routines that I thought he was talking directly to me… a metaphorical gut punch of insight that I needed to hear. That was my first instinct. Now I see it differently.

Basically this is true if you are obsessed with your routine, but otherwise it’s healthy. Only if your routine is costing you your wellbeing or your relationships with others would I agree that a routine owning you is an issue. Beyond the routine costing you in a very unhealthy way, you need the routine to pull you, to ‘own’ you in a way, or it wouldn’t be a routine.

We have some routines that are non-negotiable commitments. For example, if you have kids, you need to feed them. You don’t break the routine and not feed them dinner. But if the routine (or habit) is something negotiable, like meditation, or working out, or a minimum number of steps in a day, for example… Then there are always reasons to break the routine, or break the streak. If you don’t let the routine own you, it will quickly not become routine.

The routine needs to own you or it will no longer be something you regularly do. It’s that simple. If I’m headed to bed, exhausted, and I haven’t written my daily blog post, it’s easy to say, ‘I’ll just skip today.” But then it’s easier and easier to have other ‘acceptable’ excuses… And I would not have recently achieved 7 years of daily blogging. It’s not that I can’t function otherwise, it’s not an issue that the routine owns me more than I own it. In fact, this is precisely what is needed to ensure the routine continues.

I’ll end where I started just two days ago when I said about ‘Streaks and hard things’:

1. Our streaks are part of our identity. They don’t define us, we are defined by the act of keeping them.

2. Do hard things. The effort is its own reward. I don’t know anyone with a hard-to-keep streak who isn’t also doing well in other aspects of their lives, and ‘crushing it’… A life with intentional hard things begets a life where challenges are met and overcome rather than seen as barriers and limitations. 

There might be a reason to stop in the future… but until then the streak will keep streaking.

And the routines will keep routining… but they’ve got to own you a bit for this to happen.